As well-known in the art, with the rapid spread of the Internet all over the world, electronic commerce targeted on people throughout the world has been conducted through a medium of the Internet. Also, with the gradual development of the communication function between users, communications in various forms have been performed through the Internet.
In addition to electronic mail and file transmission, which are the most basic communication forms using the Internet, Internet telephony has been used as a substitution for wired telephony. Also, with the use of the Internet, a short message may be transmitted to a mobile telephone, and multilateral communications have been conducted through various types of chatting including text chatting, voice chatting and video chatting. Moreover, communities in which a plurality of users can exchange data, opinions, and the like about the same subject have been activated.
There are many forms of communities such as cafes, blogs, homepages, clubs, and mini-homepages, each of which puts diverse contents therein. Generally, users who have subscribed as members in a cafe or club community communicate with each other by putting contents such as data or information about a certain subject on a bulletin board of the cafe or club community. In case of a blog community, mini-homepage or the like, the user who has established it posts his/her opinions or data.
Among other things, it has been troublesome for a user to see or access desired contents put in such communities, in that the user must access the communities directly and search for the contents. However, by virtue of recent developments of search technologies, only a keyword corresponding to the contents the user wants to find is entered in a web browser, so that contents in categories, such as web documents, news, images, and online dictionaries, can be searched for the keyword. In addition, cafe or blog communities containing subject matters corresponding to the keyword can also be involved in the search. Thus, the user can easily search for the contents put in the communities without accessing the communities separately, and can easily find communities containing subject matters related to the keyword.
As other techniques, there are some conventional techniques for searching desired contents in response to a user's query. The first technique is to use an integrated search system of FAQ (frequently asked questions) list search and interactive DB search, as well as document processing on a web site. The integrated search system employs three search methods, including interactive DB search, frequently asked questions (FAQ) list search, and website query-answer, so that an optimal search and reply process, can be done by distributing a user's query to each realm.
The second technique is a technique that searches communities providing reliable contents on a network using a keyword and provides a user with the search results. This technique searches communities containing information that matches the keyword from the user via the network, measures degrees of reliability of the searched communities, and sequentially arranges the searched communities depending on the measured degrees of reliability or selects only communities having more than a predetermined degree of reliability to provide them to the user.
The third technique relates to a technique of answering to a natural language question by using a large volume of FAQ web pages. As this technique, there is proposed a technique of collecting FAQ pages from the Web, automatically extracting question/answer portions therefrom, and searching question/answer lists appropriate for a user's question to extract a best answer.
However, among the conventional search techniques the first technique has a limitation in the improvement of the search performance because the FAQ list search is targeted at a small amount of data randomly existed on the Web and the performance of mechanical analysis used in search techniques is low. The second technique searches only the communities most appropriate for a user's question by calculating the degrees of reliability for a variety of communities scattered over the Web. Therefore, the second technique has a problem that the user has to search community contents again in order to find his or her desired best answer. The third technique performs the search that is not targeted at questions/answers accumulated in communities but at a few FAQ lists on the Web and extracts the FAQ lists through a general search engine, which induces an error in the search. In addition, the third technique uses only a simple keyword matching technique considering location in the search of the best answer, and thus has a limitation in improving the search performance.